FTC Rulemaking on CAN SPAM

The FTC announced today they will be publishing clarifications to CAN SPAM in the near future. According to the FTC

The new rule provisions address four topics: (1) an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender; (2) the definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements; (3) a “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address”; and (4) a definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.

Once the rules are published, I will be sure to link to them and comment on them here. From the FTC press release, it seems that the rules are reasonably sane and any current mailer following best practices will already be in compliance.
Hat tip: MailChimp

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Links

Venkat posts today about the ruling in the Asis v. Azoogle case. I have not yet had a chance to read the whole ruling, but in talking with Mickey over at SpamSuite it seems to expand the Gordon ruling a bit.
Mickey posts on Intellectual Intercourse about spam received from a recruiting agency trying to get him to hire one of their clients. This spam was amusing in that it contained reference to a bill that Mickey helped defeat years ago.
Box of Meat blog links to a CSO online article graphically demonstrating a botnet. The representation is really helps to understand the scope of the problem.
On Bronto Blog DJ posts about resurrecting old addresses. He has it right when he says: “If you continue to send email to customers that is random and unexpected, there will be consequences.”
Matt at ReturnPath has a couple posts about who should get delivery services and how ReturnPath chooses customers. This is something I end up dealing with occasionally. There are not specific types of companies I refuse to do consulting for. I will generally provide consulting on best practices to any business segment. My one restriction is that I will not provide ISP relations (ie, contacting the ISPs) for companies that do not send opt-in email. This has caused consternation with some potential customers.
Mark Brownlow at No Man is an iland suggests renaming “open rate” as “render rate” in an effort to make it much clearer what “open rates” really measure. Expect to see render rates referred to here on this blog in the future.
Josh talks about suppression list abuse on Deliverability.com. For those of us who use unique addresses for every signup, it quickly becomes clear that there are leaks in the suppression process. I have also seen problems with leaks from subscriptions, so do not think the problem is just in suppressions.

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Blog roundup

Denise Cox has a list of 10 things your signup page should have over on her blog.
The AOL postmaster blog has its first post up talking about bounces.
BeRelevant has a great blog with lots of suggestions email best practices.
Mark Brownlow had a great post this weekon moving the unsubscribe button to the top of your newsletter to make it easy for customers to unsubscribe. The comments are a must read as well, including one commenter that saw the number of ‘this is spam’ hits go down when he moved the unsubscribe link to the top of the email.

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